One Coco plant Experiment and results!!!

I prefer soil, and have miserably failed everytime with hydro. Decided to try one coco girl as a medium. Used 70/30 fox farm coco preamended mix. Nutrients were a coco A and B, and calmag plus, feeding every other watering initially, and then every watering late veg thru bloom. Wow, surprised how much faster she took off over soil girls. While only in a 3 gallon, flowers were as massive and plentiful as in a 5 gallon. Stayed lush and green until gradual final fading weeks 5-9. Yeild nearly double over soil plants. The only thing I didnt know about coco was frequency of watering. I simply let her dry out like soil between and rehydrated fully. May have gotten better results with more frequent watering. Do some people mix coco and soil 50/50? I like the medium of coco, and may do it exclusively now over soil.

Any time water goes into the plant, nutrients should be in the water. Doing a water/feed protocol places osmotic stress on the plant because it has to constantly go back and forth between manufacturing sugars (to handle the high EC of the water) and then converting to starches (to handle the low EC of the water), and that energy could be used toward growth if the EC is kept consistent.

Don't do drybacks in coco - the coco should be kept to at least 90% saturation to get the most from what coco offers. At the very least, it should be fertigated at lights on every single day.

There are mixes that are 50/50 soil/coco, but the coco is used for its aeration properties and the entire medium would be treated like soil. Most of us who grow in coco consider putting soil in the mix it to be contaminating the medium.

ec121 said:

Any time water goes into the plant, nutrients should be in the water. Doing a water/feed protocol places osmotic stress on the plant because it has to constantly go back and forth between manufacturing sugars (to handle the high EC of the water) and then converting to starches (to handle the low EC of the water), and that energy could be used toward growth if the EC is kept consistent.

Don't do drybacks in coco - the coco should be kept to at least 90% saturation to get the most from what coco offers. At the very least, it should be fertigated at lights on every single day.

There are mixes that are 50/50 soil/coco, but the coco is used for its aeration properties and the entire medium would be treated like soil. Most of us who grow in coco consider putting soil in the mix it to be contaminating the medium.

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Great tips thank you! I was surprised how well things went without the daily watering, but see now how the medium should be treated. Yes she ate up the nutrients in every watering with no sign of burn throughout flowering. During veg she had no problem with full strength nutrients and cal mag, but I was scared of burn, hence my back and forth plain watering like soil. What are the advantages of coco? So far seems accelerated growth with better aeration, yeild seems better, not yet sure about overall quality of meds.

Smokenpassout said:

Great tips thank you! I was surprised how well things went without the daily watering, but see now how the medium should be treated. Yes she ate up the nutrients in every watering with no sign of burn throughout flowering. During veg she had no problem with full strength nutrients and cal mag, but I was scared of burn, hence my back and forth plain watering like soil. What are the advantages of coco? So far seems accelerated growth with better aeration, yeild seems better, not yet sure about overall quality of meds.

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The main advantage of coco is the air:water ratio. Even at field capacity (full saturation), there is enough oxygen present, so you can feed several times per day. Once buffered, there is no interplay between the soil and the roots with regard to nutrition; the coco is sterile - you control what the plant gets, which allows for precision fertilization.

A couple of other things...

Most nutrient lines are dosed for common plants (e.g., tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant), as most people will be growing those, so a full strength dose would be for those kinds of plants. Tomatoes can take up to 5.0 EC, so that would fry cannabis and is why people running General Hydroponics, for example, will start with 1/4 dose.

However, if you're using a line specifically made for cannabis, then a full dose will be less than half the dose of another nutrient line that isn't cannabis specific. Because of this, when discussing nutrients, terms like "full strength" and the like are ambiguous terms, so we like to speak in EC because EC is EC no matter the nutrient line.

If you don't have an EC pen, you should get one. This will allow you to measure the nutrient strength of the mix going into the pot but will also allow you to measure the runoff to know what the salinity is in the rootzone.

Always fertigate until at least 10% runoff. Drybacks cause the EC to spike due to the salts crystalizing out of solution and even if you keep the coco at 90% saturation, there is 10% that is drying and causing the EC to rise and by fertigating to at least 10%, you are able to keep the EC in the rootzone consistent.

As for does coco, organic, DWC, etc., make the best tasting smoke, if one wants to assert that synthetic nutrients cause a chemical taste to the buds, then wtf does batshit make the buds taste like?